Miner lightens email load with AXS-One archiving
Miner lightens email load with AXS-One archiving
February 27, 2009: Australian mining company Zinifex faced the problem of overloaded databases on MS Exchange servers and a lack of storage space.
It was looking for an easier way to manage the company's 3000 user mailboxes and to overcome Exchange's limited capacity for the long term lifecycle management of email. The solution was an n AXS-One archiving solution.
"AXS-One has given us flexible email management," said Mick Oxford, Senior Infrastructure Advisor with OZ Minerals (the company formed in 2008 through a merger of Zinifex and Oxiana).
"Now there's more manageability around email and it provides the capability for legal and other searches. For us, however, the bottom line is about managing people's email, and from a corporate point of view, being able to protect it and retrieve it whenever we need to."OZ Minerals is Australia’s third largest diversified mining company, the world’s second largest producer of zinc, and a substantial producer of copper, lead, gold, silver and increasingly, nickel.
Prior to installing the AXS-One Compliance Platform the company had to deal with Increasing backup times and a concern that if they ever wanted to locate specific emails they would find it extremely difficult, if not impossible. It also wanted to preserve corporate knowledge in a format that can be retrieved whenever required.
The fact that AXS-One's email archiving solution offers regulatory compliance was a bonus, particularly for Zinifex's legal department.
AXS-One installed the three integrated components of the AXS-One Compliance Platform: AXS-Link for MS Exchange-operational and compliance; AXS-One Retention Manager and AXS-One Case Management.
These provide Zinifex with a central archive to facilitate the storage, retrieval and policy-based management of all emails sent and received across the entire organisation.Email is archived automatically in the background; users do not need to participate in thearchiving process and annoying “mailbox over the limit” notices are a thing of the past. Users retrieve archived email in their mailbox just like they retrieve email from the Exchange server.
With AXS-One Retention Manager, OZ Minerals is able to effectively and automatically manage corporate records according to their unique classification, retention period and disposition requirements, providing an audit trail and a reporting capability.
Retention Manager also helps ensure specific regulatory and internal requirements are followed, which reduces the risk of data not being available to access when required. AXS-One Case Management provides OZ Minerals with a scalable option to allow authorised users to create case files that can be populated with data from the archive. This process means the existing retention policies for all records in the case are suspended as a hold is applied to them, preventing deletion while the case is active. The case is updated as new data is ingested into the archive and irrelevant data can be culled by the user to respond to legal discovery requests with more accurate information.
To assist the IT team leader and others responsible for email archiving, OZ Minerals is outsourcing administrative support through AXS-One Administration Services, where AXS-One support engineers work as an extension to the IT team. In addition to routine daily support, this service provides valuable monitoring and status reports, which help in the overall management of the Exchange email system.
Messages are captured after they are sent and before they arrive in the employee’s mailbox to ensure that an original, unaltered copy of every message is always retained in the central AXS-One archive.
After 90 days of sitting in the mail server, emails undergo a de-duplication process and are compressed before being archived into a central repository. This reduces the size of the email database and frees up space on the mail server.
On their desktop, employees can see that older emails have a blue stub, while the ones under three months old have a green stub. All are equally accessible.
"There's no longer any need to transfer any data to offline storage, which just takes up space on another server," said Mick. "If 20 people in the company each receive an email with the same 40MB PowerPoint attachment, this can take a large chunk of storage. But after 90 days, every copy is removed and a 1KB stub left in the user's mailbox that is linked to one copy of it in the archive.
"This weekly archiving process, by continuously reducing the size of a user's mailbox by 25-75 per cent, has meant we have been able to reduce the number of mail servers by 15 per cent," he said.
"The email archiving solution will also allow us to consolidate all our mail servers in our data centre rather than at numerous locations. This consolidation is now underway."